Human Sister

submersibles in the sonic shadows of a labyrinth of valleys and trenches that led to the seamount cave sheltering Anzen, a robotic scanner had come, only a half-hour before, to within four-tenths of a kilometer of us before it had swum away.
    That was five months ago.
    Five months without Elio or Grandpa or Grandma or Lily.
    Five months of trying to climb sentence by sentence back into the life I loved.
    Five months of emptying myself onto these many pages, of withering into words.

    The day we arrived, during a pause in the tears, I asked Michael how he’d been able to control me to such an extent when he’d taken me from the cruiser.
    “As a general rule,” he answered, “you don’t become consciously aware of what you’re going to say or do until you’ve already unconsciously begun to say or do it—within a fraction of a second, that is. Based on the many mental experiences we’ve shared, I’m able to calculate, predict, and change your motor responses before your brain is able to initiate other responses. You, of course, are only aware of what you do or say and can’t sense my counter-response commands. It’s a question of speed, really. Between your sensations and your response, there’s a gap of time; between the initiation of your response and your consciousness of that initiation, there’s a gap of time.”
    “But Grandpa told me you’d never be able to do that—override my will and incorporate me so completely into yourself.”
    “He might have assumed that my relatively few connections through the braincord to your brain could never override the manifold connections naturally established there. But it’s not so much a matter of quantity as it is a matter of prediction, timing, and speed of innervation.”
    I looked at him, he who had blossomed from the encyclopedia of my cells. He was becoming someone greater than I. No wonder Elio had loved him. If anyone ever bothers to look back at us humans, perhaps he or she or it will see us as nothing more than a metaphor—a bridge between what was and what came to be.

    This morning, 19 June, we received another letter from First Brother. He requested to see me in Grandma’s garden tomorrow afternoon near sunset.
    Michael didn’t want me to go. He said I would be in danger both from the humans, who undoubtedly would perceive me as being a traitor, and from the androids, whose culling-of-the-human-herd proposal I had refused to answer.
    “But he’s my brother,” I said. “He’s simply asked me to come to see him. He must need me for something he believes is important. At the least, the androids need to know that some human loves them even if she doesn’t agree to do everything they ask her to do. After reliving my life in memory these past months, I now understand that from when I was just a girl, perhaps from even before I was born, my purpose—my job in Mom’s and Dad’s and Grandpa’s eyes—has been to help their creations feel compassion and love.”
    Michael looked down, his eyes filling with tears.
    “Please don’t misunderstand. I didn’t think of you as being a job. I simply and deeply loved you and did my best to care for you. I was just a girl, a little human girl, who was unaware of the hidden forces working through her. Yet despite my ignorance, or perhaps in part because of it, you were a tremendous success. My other brothers, though, they still need my help.”
    “You know, don’t you,” Michael said, “that you will never be able to return here or contact me unless you’re confident that our work here, our future children, would be safe?”
    I knew he was right, but I was so gripped by sadness that I couldn’t answer. Like Grandpa, Michael let me cry myself out, a small fire consuming itself. Then, saying, “I want to show you something,” he offered me our braincord.
    I don’t know how to write in the short time I have left before departing how I felt at that moment, feel even now in the shadow of this event that occurred just minutes ago. I knew I had to leave, had to see First Brother and Grandma and the garden; but I also knew that this might be the last time Michael and I would be able so intimately to share our intersubjective space.
    I relaxed as the braincord swam up through my nasal rheum to its junctions. Then, through a scrim of delicate Japanese maple leaves, I saw a young couple sitting on a bench, holding hands in front of a garden waterfall. One looked like Elio, the other like me. Their